


Doubting Fucking Thomas

by apiphile



Category: Legend (2015)
Genre: Blood, M/M, No Beta, Violence, bad medical practice, but i think woundfucking covers it tbh, christmas present for liza, er i should probably warn for something, fingering of gashes, happy christmas bro, i literally wrote this to flesh out that tag, i wrote most of this on a train, it's all about the suffering baby, it's fine i am happy dwelling in my own filth, no fucks given, no research, seriously i wrote this longhand with a cracked metacarpal, who even writes sex any more, who lets me, with a broken hand, woundfucking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-13
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2018-05-06 12:29:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5417156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Liza wanted Krays fic, I wanted to write woundfucking, I haven't got over the habit of writing out of chronological order from NaNo, you don't want to read this because it is absolutely terrible.  This is not a self-effacing act of modesty: this fic is terrible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Doubting Fucking Thomas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LizaPod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LizaPod/gifts), [Nerve_Itch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerve_Itch/gifts).



All Reggie said when he came was, “Fuck’s sake”. A bit after that he said, “I ain’t driving him to a fucking hospital, I’ve got George Raft coming tonight.”

It wasn’t Teddy’s pathetic fucking face and his fish-gasp mouth that changed his mind, neither. You had to keep a hard heart in the kind of business what brought you up against Charlie Richardson and his electrodes. Mad Teddy might be lying in his own blood in what had probably once been pristine white y-fronts but it wasn’t like the wound was anywhere urgent. He’d fucking live. He’d definitely fucking live until after breakfast, which was the earliest Reggie ought be bothered with this. Not now, when he had an important guest or ten in to entertain. 

No, it wasn’t Mad Teddy’s stab wound and his agonised and bewildered face, like a dog that don’t know why he’d been kicked, which swung him round. 

His nutjob brother had his hand in it up to the knuckles and blood on his glasses and blood on his cuffs. You could see his fingers under the skin. _If he dies,_ Reggie thought abstractedly, _that’s that fucking suit done._ And there was Ronnie, tucking himself back in, and Lord knew Reg did _not_ want to know what had happened there, but he was going to have to ask. 

“Ron,” he sighed. “What is this?”

His brother wiped his fingers on a handkerchief ( _that’s a fucking shilling, you dirty sod,_ he grumbled internally, always prepared to be tight when there was no one who needed to witness his infamous largesse) and pushed up his glasses with the same two fingers. Reggie did not stop to speculate where else they’d been because he could damn well _guess_.

“He was not behaving right,” Ron explained.

_Explained_. That was a fucking laugh. Reggie looked at the green wallpaper on the walls of his brother’s flat, the bizarre array of exotic gifts left to him by anxious well-wishers – mostly statues of varying levels of ugliness with their little chaps out – and sighed.

“Yes?”

Ronnie looked down at Mad Teddy as if he’d never seen him before and said, “He’s going to behave now though, ain’t you?” with his usual intensity.

Teddy, his fingers curled in pain and his dumb prettyboy face made more bloody stupid, made some kind of silent procession of vowels which could have some kind of meaning if you was inclined to want one.

“Yeah,” Reggie said, making pointed eye contact with the supine Teddy, “he will.”

Or he’d run to the bloody filth, and they couldn’t have that.

* * *

Ron Kray’s flat was what you’d call sumptuously appointed, and indeed that’s what that Lord Boothby had called it, in that big fat plum and honey voice he liked to use – Teddy had laughed right in his fucking face, because he could do that. He wasn’t one of the boys being paid to be friendly. He was just there to help the party – a zoo full of dirty old buggers in Savile Row togs all draped over with cheap little tarts – go with a _bang_.

It was very nice, Teddy agreed, when he’d stopped laughing. Nigel was very nice too. Perhaps Lord Boothby would like to meet him? He could vouch that Nigel was very nice. The boss had broken him in personally, hadn’t he?

Nigel, who was not supposed to be saying words out loud to people, said, “Wiv a carpet beater,” looking both sheepish and sore.

Teddy gave him a little slap for being cheeky and left him howling on Boothby’s lap like a cat what’d had his tail pulled.

He walked through the cigar smoke like whatshisname, Ron called him, Mephistoplehes, and breezed into the next room high on his own importance. 

Two men old enough to be his old man and considerably richer than his whole family was pulling one off over some spade Teddy didn’t recognise, costly trousers around their knees, round red sweaty faces pulled into posh creases.

You had to laugh, didn’t you.

Ron dug his fingers into Teddy’s shoulder, unexpected, like. Teddy turned his jump of alarm into a swoon and a giggle, showed off his teeth. Odds on whether he’d got Gentle Ron or Exciting Ron tonight stood at fifty-fifty: Gentle Ron was good for a chat about the future of Ugandan orphans which quite frankly Teddy did not give a tinker’s for but also came with some very acceptable fucking; Exciting Ron left marks and tended to incoherence and foam flecks. Gentle Ron also made tea, after, which to Teddy’s mind spoke whole Biblical-szie volumes.

It wasn’t like Ron made tea for many people no more, was it.

“Having fun, are we?” Ron asked.

Teddy giggled obligingly.

“Enjoying yourself, are we?”

“Of course, Ron,” Teddy said, miming a mouthful of cock as a matter of course. “Proper buggers’ paradise, innit?”

He didn’ realise at the time that this wasn’t the right answer. Ron just put his hand on Teddy’s cock, gave it a gentle, friendly squeeze through the wool of his trousers, and wandered off.

* * *

There was certain rules you had to follow. 

Teddy washed his hair in the sink/ Had his braces round his thighs. Dark outside but the curtains fucking open. Nice vet, good cotton. Very white, very _clean_. Ron liked his boys to be clean. You could see your face in Teddy’s arse if you looked hard enough, he was that clean. Ron had heard the joke: he had seen his face in Teddy’s arse. Ah ha ha ha.

A very funny joke.

Teddy cleaned under his fingernails with the end of a teaspoon, checked his teeth in the mirror. They was good teeth, his. The trouble with Ron’s was the sugar. You couldn’t take a decent amount of sugar in your tea without your teeth doing one, that was the trouble.

“Come ‘ere,” he told Teddy, who turned and gave him a dazzling, confused smile. All teeth and no bite; that was the thing about Teddy. He didn’t say ‘no’ to Ron about nothing. Never said, ‘Ron, stop that’ or ‘Ron, that’s bloody insane’. Respectful. Never put his case to you rudely. “I said come ‘ere.”

He came to the chair with his braces slapping on his legs. “Yes, Ron?”

Yes, that was Teddy. He said yes to everything. Ron heard them calling Teddy his yes-man, (and his bum-boy, and all sorts) when they thought he couldn’t hear, when of course he heard everything, didn’t he, because it wasn’t like there was no sort of divide between the physical and the realm of ghosts where spoken things lived…

Ron took the knife out from under the chair cushion and held it out to Teddy handle-first. 

Teddy laughed. Ron was aware that he did this when he did not understand what was expected of him, because Teddy was not what you would call very bright, so he explained. Projecting this thought into his head was probably not going to work because Teddy was not very receptive to thoughts.

“I want you to stab yourself,” he said, patiently, tapping his own thigh on the outside. “Here.”

Teddy’s smile faded off his face and left only hard confusion and brief anger. It was cold, his look. You saw that, sometimes, when you made requests of people, and then, as Teddy did now, they would crease up and laugh a bit – the hard, cold, “What” followed by a giggle:

“Good one, Ron, you really had me going a minute there!”

His laugh was grating and high. He said it like he wanted it to be true. Ron politely pointed the knife handle at him again, and reiterated, “This is not a joke, I am not making a joke here. I want you to stab yourself in the thigh.”

Doubt and bewilderment etched themselves into Teddy’s face and made a neighbour of wounded feelings. “Now, Ron—“ he said, throwing up his hands.

“Did you say ‘no’?”

“I did not –“ Teddy’s eyes widened like pennies, great big pennies, and he raised a smile onto the corners of his mouth that failed to his kiss big penny coin eyes.

Ron prodded him in the back of the hand with the knife handle. “Get on with it, then,” he said, playfully, but Teddy just gave him another confused, wounded look with his big dumb eyes.

“What’d I do, Ron?” he whispered.

“Fuck’s sae,” Ronnie complained, turning the knife around to fit in his hand and pointing it at him. “Do I have to do everything myself?”

Teddy lifted his hands in front of his leg, fingers spread. “What’d I do?”

Ronnie gestured with the point of the knife. “You’ll want to take off them trousers and your nice vest.”

Teddy did as he was told clothing-wise, but he done the whole thing grizzling in a way Ron found bloody unattractive. 

“Cheer up,” he complained, holding the knife steady six inches over Teddy’s thigh, Teddy standing there shivering like a bloody dog in his socks and his nice clean white cotton underpants, twitching and all the time with his big wide why-me eyes on Ron. “It’s not like I’m going to _hit_ you and ruin your nice face, is it?”

Teddy found his manners in him to say, “Ta, Ron,” and Ron appreciated it. He put the tip of the knife to Teddy’s leg and stabbed him in the leg.

Teddy folded up like a knife himself but he didn’t make a sound. He was crying, he was definitely crying, big red tears on his face and down his thigh, but he didn’t make no noise.

* * *

Mad Teddy lay on the back seat of Reggie Kray’s nice new car and bled onto a blanket. The blanket was gunna have to go too, Reggie thought, looking in the mirror, whether Teddy died or not. He weren’t bleeding so much now but it was stiff and brown and it was going to stink in a day or two, there wasn’t a laundrette in town that’d touch this. Might as well hoof it into a fucking canal.

“What the fuck was you thinking?” he muttered to Ron. Ron, staring out of the window with his thumb against his gums and his mind turned inward, didn’t have nothing to say. He made a couple of noises that could have meant one thing or another or nothing, like Ron did, and stare, and he stared.

In the back seat Teddy asked, very politely, if they was going near to an hospital. He wasn’t going to say nothing to no one, Teddy explained, in a tight worried voice, and he’d not go if they didn’t want him to, but he thought if they was going _near_ to one he might like to go and tell them he’d fallen trying to help his old mum with the dishes, fallen on a knife, just to make sure he could still walk in future.

“Ron,” Reggie snapped, ignoring the whinging bum-boy in the back seat, “don’t pretend you didn’t do nothing. I _saw_ you, you dirty bugger. What the fuck was that?”

“He wasn’t behaving himself,” Ronnie mumbled into his thumb knuckles.

Reggie doubted that, because that cackling fucking baby-faced sodomite bleeding all over Reggie’s fucking brand new car was so besotted with his bonkers bastard brother that had Ronnie told him to suck off a live eel he’d have it in his gob without stopping to ask if Ron wanted him to put salt on it first.

They watched an old black Rover go by with two tarts in the back.

“You’re a fucking liability,” Reggie said.

His brother stared at the road.

Reggie turned in his seat. “We’re gunna take you o somewhere to get stitched up nice,” he said, patting Teddy on some part that wasn’t covered in sticky blood or sticky bloody … Ron. Teddy kept his hand clamped over the stab wound.

He said, “Thanks, Reggie,” weakly.

“Don’t fucking _thank_ me,” said Reg, glaring at his brother. “Just don’t _tell_ no one about this.”

“Course not, Reggie,” murmured Teddy, looking at his leg.

“Are you,” Ronnie asked, in a loud unsteady voice out of absolutely fucking nowhere, apparently asking the road in front of them, “enjoying yourself, Teddy?”

There was a pause the size of a femoral stab wound. A lot of words went unsaid through it, passing between Reggie and Teddy like an electric current ( _you love him and I love him but **fuck me** don’t you sometimes wish you didn’t?_ ), and in the distance the blues and twos went off like a beckoning finger: come back to jail.

“Course he is,” Reggie said, manfully suppressing his sarcasm. “Now sit tight, because we have to go and get a bloody vet out of bed.”

* * *

Mad Teddy had never been stabbed before. He’d led what he liked to think of as an acceptably charmed life that way. He didn’t piss no one off who’d do anything about it and he had Ron Kray at his back so no one _would_ do nothing about it, because they was all scared of him. Perhaps it might have paid to remember why they was all scared of Ron Kray, but when you’re on top of a fucking tiger you don’t pay as much attention to the claws as you ought, do you? 

Mad Teddy hadn’t never broken nothing, neither, and he hadn’t done a sprain to himself, and he hadn’t got no reference for having a knife stuck in his tense, shivering thigh. Maybe the odd clip around the ear from his old man, maybe the odd punch in the face in a street corner fight but that was so long ago he couldn’t recall it: it couldn’t have felt like this.

He folded up like a newspaper as Ron pulled the knife out and tried to squeeze the hole in his leg as the blood came with it. If he just squeezed hard enough it’d stop fucking hurting, maybe the blood’d stop, he could just lie down and think about what to do next.

Ron nudged him with his toe. “What you lying down for? I didn’t tell you to lie down.”

“It’s me leg, Ron.”

Ronnie gave him a blank look and squatted beside him. “You ain’t taking this like I’d hoped.”

Teddy swallowed, and on a reflex just as strong as squeezing his leg, said, “Sorry, Ron.”

Ronnie patted him on the heaving, sweaty stomach. “What you squeezing that for?”

“It’s bleeding,” Teddy said, because Ron had this habit, didn’t he, of not always noticing what looked like the bleeding obvious because his mind was elsewhere. Where his mind was, fuck only knew, but it was a place he came back from with a hatful of rabbits or a utopian vision or a Christmas dinner in March and you just had to roll the dice and take your luck. The ceiling slowly swam out of focus and Teddy tried to pretend he remembered how to breathe steady.

Ronnie put his hand on Teddy’s wrist. He pulled his hand off the hole in his thigh, insistent and firm. No messing. He stared at the hole, and Teddy felt it throb, felt a gout of blood well up and dribble down in time with his heartbeat, in time with the _fuck… fuck… fuck…_ running through his head. 

Ron stood up, backed off, and went to the telephone. He picked up the receiver. He checked a list by the telephone. Everything that happened now happened slowly. Each moment in time was longer than an hour, and Teddy felt his stomach trembling gently by itself, quivering like a plate of jelly. _Put me in a rabbit mould_ , he thought, watching Ron bark into the phone:

“Put my brother on the phone.”

And

“I do not give a damn if he is busy and I do not care who is talking to, this is very important.”

And 

“Well you don’t know what you’re talking about it.”

And 

“ _You’re_ the fucking liability.”

At some point the conversation finished. Teddy found his fingers had curled towards his palms during his squirming. He’d bled on the carpet. They was going to need a new carpet. Blood didn’t come out of carpets. 

Ron squatted beside him and put his hand on Teddy’s leg.

Teddy threw his head back and bit his tongue. No good the neighbours hearing. Not that they didn’t hear some foul things but they’d better not hear a fucking murder, as it sounded, taking place. Ron wouldn’t do good in prison. He listened to the singing sound of blood in his own ears, listened to the white hot pain welling in his body. It was all over, now, not just his leg. He was on fire.

Ron stroked the wound with the tips of his fingers and Teddy tried very hard not to actually bite through the end of his tongue. He’d never wondered what it felt like to be a piece of kindling bursting into flames and now he’d never need to.

Ronnie pushed his finger inside. Teddy sank his teeth into the inside of his mouth for variety, as a howl bubbled up inside him and threatened to spill out of his mouth despite his precautions. He tried to grab at all the other times Ron had been _inside_ him, same hand, not so far from where he was now, but all he could register was pain and a pressing wish to be somewhere else.

He felt like he was fucking floating. There was something warm between his legs – at first he thought it was Ron but realised, with detached indifference, that he’d pissed himself. Last time he’d done that he’d been too drunk to walk and too drunk to care what he’d done, and he felt drunk now, like his head was full up of air. Ron didn’t seem to have noticed the piss. 

Teddy squeezed his eyes open and his mouth shut as something squirmed in his fucking leg and blotted out his ability to see. He squinted and choked on a fucking squeal and half sat up – before Ron pushed him back down with a selection of knuckles and an impatient grunt he saw his boss hunched over him, saw a bulge in his own flesh.

The sight of it added nausea to his agonies and sent him reeling; a twist and another grunt from Ron didn’t improve it none, and when he could bring himself to look again his boss had his hand on his trouser fly and Teddy’s mind just blanked right out and wouldn’t take it in.

_Nah_ , he thought, swallowing blood and saliva. _He’s not_.

He heaved himself up onto one elbow. Ron didn’t push him down this time. Too busy.

He _was_. He’d his fucking fingers right in Teddy’s actual fucking thigh and he was having a wank.

“Ron,” Teddy rasped, trying to put some words to an emotion that was nine-tenths pain and one-tenth fucking terrifying. 

Ronnie said something impatient, faintly soothing and explanatory in tone, and unfortunately also completely incoherent. Teddy couldn’t tell if it was his own ability to understand, fucked out of all shape by his white-hot suffering, or Ron’s ability to make fucking sense in the first place, which was usually a visitor whose presence could be foretold by the use of his bloody pills, and whose stays were not always guaranteed.

“What you doing—“ Teddy attempted. It came out as a gurgle. His tongue hurt. Stupid. Ron had his hand inside Teddy’s fucking leg and his _tongue_ hurt from biting on it. 

He closed his eyes and fell back, felt rather than saw Ron’s shoulder working.

“Let me help you—“ he tried, but Ron just pushed further inside his leg and the blank slate of pain cleaned all the words off his tongue.

* * *

After the needle, Reggie paid Mr Northcote for the stitches and for the silence. Never to mention it to no one. He paid Teddy, as well, handing out a sizeable number of notes. 

“See that you forget all about this,” Reggie advised, as Teddy stood there on one leg with his thigh wrapped in white. 

“I don’t want ‘em,” Teddy said, trying to give them back. Ron was staring at nothing, somewhere above both of their heads. Maybe it was an angel. He’d said he’d seen an angel once. Teddy saw no reason to doubt that.

Reggie gave him a dangerously polite smile and said, “It’s for yer aspirins,” he said, pointing at Teddy’s leg. “That’s gunna hurt.”

“Don’t take aspirin,” Mr. Northcote said, earning himself a glare that could’ve pinned anyone else to the fucking wall. “It thins the blood, Mr. Kray, no aspirin until at least tomorrow.”

Reggie pretended to give a toss about this and smiled an endearing and toothy smile at Mr. Northcote, gave him a sarcastic little salute. Teddy looked at Ron, who’d come about and was looking at the photos of racehorses on Mr. Northcote’s wall with a real interest. 

“We’re not going to shoot him,” Ronnie said, pointing at Teddy with absolute intensity. “Just ‘cos he’s hurt his leg.”

“What?” Reggie demanded, plainly tired.

“It’s alright, Ron,” Teddy said, touching the back of his hand with the back of his own. “You’re not going to shoot me for hurting my leg, it’ll be right as rain in no time.”

Reggie mouthed at him, when Ron went back to the pictures, _You fucking deserve each other_.

_You can bloody talk,_ Teddy thought, but he kept his mouth shut, fitted his teeth to the grooves in his tongue.


End file.
